Adele Tan

Performance art events began in China in the 1980s following Deng Xioping’s post-Mao economic reforms in 1979, which exposed Chinese socialist society to foreign investments and influences. In 1985, at a time when China’s mainstream art was mostly defined by official Academic Realism or Socialist Realism, incipient strands of avant-gardist experimentation were surfacing through informal art groups. Robert Rauschenberg, for instance, held a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing. The exhibition displayed innovative readymade assemblages, installations and collaborations, introducing Chinese audiences and artists to major trends in contemporary Western art, including the breaking of aesthetic and conceptual boundaries, thus motivating artists away from deeply embedded modes of thinking and art-making. Rauschenberg’s exhibition confirmed a rising awareness in China that art could embrace participatory agency, and break down rules of perception and action, while ex...

... View larger version(127K), Aleks Danko, Rolling Home, 2004, commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial International 04, photo by Alexandra Wolkowicz. ... Oriana Fox got into multiple role‐playing in excerpt scenes from the hit US comedy series Sex and the City, David Rowland's ...

... L'histoire de la performance à Singapour s'étale sur trois décennies, à partir d'un happening de Tan Kah Kee en 1979 ... d'associer la programmation à l'histoire de l'art dans la région, par exemple aux célèbres sculptures publiques, comme Seeds (1998) de Han Sai Por et ...

Performance Art in China takes as its subject one of the most dynamic and controversial areas of experimental art practice in China. In his comprehensive study, Sydney-based theorist and art historian Thomas J. Berghuis introduces and investigates the idea of the "role of the mediated subject of the acting body in art," a notion grounded in the realization that the body is always present in art practice, as well as its subsequent, secondary representations. Through a series of in-depth case studies, Berghuis reveals how, during the past 25 years, Chinese performance artists have "acted out" their art, often in opposition to the principles governing correct behavior in the public domain. In addition to a 25-year chronology of events, a systematic index of places, names and key terms, as well as a bibliography and a glossary in English and Chinese, this study also offers the reader numerous previously unpublished photos and documents.